Sales by mo­bile de­vices now ex­ceed PC shop­ping: re­port

Jacky Wang ( ), vice pres­i­dent of the e-com­merce group at Ya­hoo Tai­wan and Hong Kong, and Kuo Broth­ers co-founder and en­tre­pre­neur Jerry Kuo ( ) both back up this claim, ac­cord­ing to lo­cal news­pa­per United Daily News. They said that sales made by smart­phone and other mo­bile de­vices first sur­passed sales made via PCs in Fe­bru­ary, and saw 90 per­cent growth in the first half of this year alone.

Con­sumer be­hav­ior has changed — shop­pers browse on their smart­phones to shop dur­ing their free time, es­pe­cially dur­ing week­ends, Wang an­a­lyzed. How peo­ple value their time on the week­ends ex­plains the shift in be­hav­ior. And not us­ing one’s com­puter was a form of re­lax­ation, Wang said.

Last month, 60 per­cent of sales from the Kuo Broth­ers’ five online shop­ping sites came from shop­pers us­ing mo­bile de­vices. Kuo re­vealed that the smart­phone shop­ping era had de­vel­oped far more quickly than an­tic­i­pated.

Sales from peo­ple be­tween the ages of 50 and 60 us­ing mo­bile de­vices were very strong, Kuo said. The age group was more likely to buy high-priced goods com­pared with the younger, more tech­nol­ogy- savvy gen­er­a­tion. Kuo sug­gested that smart­phones’ and tablets’ eas­ier ac­ces­si­bil­ity, com­pared to desk­top or notebook PCs, added to their pop­u­lar­ity among the older gen­er­a­tion of users.

The rise in pop­u­lar­ity of shop- ping us­ing a mo­bile de­vice has de­bunked pre­vi­ous myths of how peo­ple would be de­railed due to smaller font and screen sizes of smart­phones and tablets. Kuo said that the font size on the online shop­ping sites un­der his brand, man­aged with his brother Andy Kuo ( ), were op­ti­mized ac­cord­ing to the user’s screen size.

“Smart­phone users can easily ad­just their font size and color set­ting on their phones as well,” Kuo said.

Shop­ping with mo­bile de­vices gave por­tal sites, web­sites that pro­vide a gate­way to in­for­ma­tion in a par­tic­u­lar in­dus­try, a leg up, Kuo said.

Smart­phone users are im­pul­sive shop­pers as they usu­ally make their pur­chases while they are on the go. That makes func­tions such as rank­ing by pop­u­lar­ity where goods are sug­gested to buy­ers as one of the main ways to earn a profit, Kuo stated. He re­marked on how this was op­po­site to how con­sumers shopped us­ing PCs — brows­ing through tens of thou­sands of prod­ucts.

Ac­cord­ing to Ya­hoo’s sta­tis­tics, Wang pointed out that 37.1 per­cent of smart­phone shop­pers were more likely to use mo­bile apps to pur­chase prod­ucts by scan­ning bar­codes or QR codes to com­pare prices. Of those sur­veyed, 38.4 per­cent of shop­pers said they looked for­ward to see­ing a GPS func­tion to help lo­cate prod­ucts in a store with their smart­phone.

What was no­table is how 51.6 per­cent of smart­phone users are more likely to com­plete their pur­chases were col­lec­tors of coupons from tra­di­tional brick and mo­tor stores and online, mak­ing com­par­i­son of dis­count of­fers a pop­u­lar pur­chas­ing in­cen­tive as well.